With fast development of information technologies, it is increasingly easier for people to communicate with each other, and the communication methods are increasing as well, for example, to communicate through a cell phone or a fixed phone, to communicate through an electronic mail (email), to communicate through an instant messaging (IM: Instant Messaging) terminal and so on. Because of a variety of reasons, a user will communicate with more and more people, each having different contact manners. Consequently, it is almost an impossible mission for a user to remember all of the contact manners of everyone who communicates with him or her. Thus, in order to reduce memory capacity of a user and be convenient for a user to communicate with others, a conception of contact list is provided.
A contact list is usually maintained by a user himself. Contact information in the contact list includes at least two parts, one being an identifier of a contact recorded by the user, which may be a name, a nickname, a code and so on, the other being contact manner, which may be a telephone number, and/or an email address, and/or a IM account number and so on.
A prior method of displaying a contact list is based on a particular order, such as alphabetic order, Chinese pinyin alphabetic order and so on, to display contacts in the contact list. Due to limitation on the display size of a terminal screen, contacts in the contact list may need several screens to be displayed completely. Consequently, the contact list will be paged to display. If a user wants to find a particular contact, he may have to scroll several pages to find it, which leads to inconvenience for the user and degrades the user's experience.